Evelien is a democratic innovation practitioner who believes meaningful conversation is infrastructure, not luxury. As co-founder of dembrane, and through her work with the Association for Civic Tech in Europe (ACTE), she's spent the last years building tools that help people think together rather than past each other— collaborating with practitioners and researchers from all over Europe. Drawing on years of community building and expertise in innovation and e-participation, Evelien works at the intersection of dialogue design, civic technology, and collective intelligence. Her approach challenges a core assumption of digital democracy: that scaling participation means choosing between depth and reach. She bridges technological capability with deep democratic practice, working to create pro-cognitive technology where LLM's are an invitation to go deeper—not a shortcut to scale.